Kenzo / Fall 2012 RTW

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Nothing about Sunday’s Kenzo show was easy. The location—the cool, colorful and very designed university building reachable only via a few connecting one-way streets—wasn’t easy to get to (and the traffic-stifling rain, although out of anyone’s control, didn’t help). The coordination and timing of almost 50 models navigating the four floors of the building—no way was that easy. And flying a team from New York’s Magnolia Bakery to Paris just so they could bake delightful, lavender-frosted cupcakes for the audience? And yet all of this is exactly what made the show feel so wonderfully authentic to creative directors Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, two people who never seem to let the limits of reality get in the way of creativity.

The show they staged, one of considerably higher production value than last season’s memorable, but relatively low-key presentation, was their second since taking over the house last summer. The models walked through the hallways and down the escalators in twos, fours, and by themselves, grouped by look or theme, and boy were there a lot of themes and looks. Karlie Kloss opened, her signature, stallion stride lending a certain unearthly sensuality to a tweed skirt and matching jacket with oversize lapels, and a logo sweatshirt. More tweed looks followed, a mix of tomboy (straight cropped pants, fitted sweaters) and girly (short-sleeved tops with kicky, abbreviated skirts), then came prints ranging from a sort of old-school Italian tablecloth grapevine to more signature geometric patterns, like the green-and-white crosshatch print of a fitted, double-breasted coat with pants in a contrasting green and red. Stripes were worn with diamond prints, worn with crosshatch-weave prints. The number of combinations was matched only by the spectrum of colors (if you can imagine it, it was in here) and different ways to think about dressing. Do you do the youthful, leggy look with a lug-sole, neon-accented loafer, or stricter pants with a voluminous, cocoon-type jacket? Or maybe it’s about a high-waisted, long column skirt with a tucked-in sweatshirt and tread-sole oxford with metallic detail. No matter what you choose, the truth was there were a lot of clothes to choose from. The pieces that felt most tied to the Kenzo DNA were looks like a red velvet fitted pantsuit with military-style hats and the baseball jackets in a mix of wool with colorful, chunky-knit sleeves. Much of the rest of it—that ingenue silhouette, sweatshirt dressing, full skirts, and flirty peplums—felt particular to Lim and Leon who, like the house’s founder, Kenzo Takada, have a preternatural and enviable knack for connecting with a generation of fun and stylish downtown kids.

That’s the thing about these two visionaries. In everything they do, they are always abosolutely, authentically themselves.